The Mummy Read Free Page A

night as well. The priests of Osiris rose from the corpses they’d created, their holy knives dripping rubies, and—at Imhotep’s nod—climbed the dunes to watch the Med-jai depart.
    When his priests reported back to him that the final Med-jai had vanished over a distant dune, Imhotep nodded one last time.
    Then he and his priests raced to the grave of Anck-su-namun and began digging at the sand with their hands, urgently, furiously, as if the most valuable buried treasure in the world awaited them.
    Which, in Imhotep’s eyes, it did.

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    City of the Dead
    T he starry sky conspired with the scimitar-slice moon to turn the desert a blue-tinged ivory, its dunes undulating sinuously, sensuously, like reclining concubines beckoning their lovers; no more peaceful landscape could be imagined, no silence more still, more complete . . . only to dissolve under the sand-stirring hooves of the whinnying horses bearing chariots whose mighty wheels carved grooves in the desert floor.
    Whip cracks split the night, horses straining forward, men straining forward, as the priests of Osiris followed their highest, most holy master on the lowest, most unholy of missions.
    Imhotep led the charge, racing against time, against discovery, against the gods themselves. He was the general of a small army of black chariots steered by bald muscular men with desert-withered flesh who served their smooth-skinned master unquestioningly, willing to follow him even into hell. Which, on this lovely desert night, they were.
    The chariot just behind Imhotep served as the hearse of the twisted, shriveled mummy that had been Anck-su-namun. The curse Imhotep had leveled upon his beloved must be cast out, must be reversed, and in this land there was only one way, one place, one book that could dispense such a forbidden mercy.
    Just as The Book of Amun Ra had sucked the soul from Imhotep’s lover, so could that other book, that volume of which even to speak was blasphemy, restore Anck-su-namun’s spiritual essence. Moreover, this book, which in the rites of his religion must never be opened, this blackest of books . . .
    . . . The Book of the Dead . . .
    . . . this book alone held the incantations that could bring his beloved back to life, and in her perfect earthly state.
    To do such an unholy thing was to defy the gods; as high priest of Osiris—god of the underworld—Imhotep understood this as few living men could. And yet had not Osiris himself risen from the dead, due to the love of Isis, his own beloved? As the loyal high priest of Osiris, should Imhotep be denied any less for the woman he loved? No matter—for the return of Anck-su-namun, Imhotep would willingly risk not just his life, but his soul.
    So that no sacrilege might ever disgrace their kingdom, The Book of the Dead lay in the care of the god Anubis, at Hamanaptra, that unspeakable place known in whispers as the City of the Dead. Not a city in the sense of the City of the Living, Thebes, Hamanaptra was the temple of the god Anubis, and like many temples in the kingdom, it was not a single structure, rather a walled complex of buildings and courtyards with the honored statue of Anubis—who “lived” in the temple—in its midst.
    No one lived at Hamanaptra but the warrior priests of Anubis, and the real “City of the Dead” lay below ground, carved into the rock under the dunes—rock-cut tombs having replaced those impractical, pyramidal monstrosities of the early pharaohs—an underground maze of tunnels, staircases, corridors, mausoleums, and elegant underground rooms, booby-trapped with false doors and blocked passages to bedevil grave robbers.
    The small army of chariots raced up the sloping sand and rumbled onto the stone ramp rising to the massive wooden gates of the temple complex, where a company of warrior priests, their shields bearing the skull-like design of Hamanaptra, stood guard. But these fierce soldiers of Anubis did not question the entry of such holy men,